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The user may describe the screen on the Thin-Film Transistor (TFT) Monitors as being fuzzy, blurry or not clear and crisp.

Affected configurations

15" TFTs optimum resolution and refresh rate is 1024x768@60 Hz

17" TFTs optimum resolution and refresh rate is 1280x1024@60 Hz

18" TFTs optimum resolution and refresh rate is 1280x1024@60 Hz

19" TFTs optimum resolution and refresh rate is 1280x1024@60 Hz

20" TFTs optimum resolution and refresh rate is 1600x1200@60 Hz

Solution

Follow the directions found in the Users Guide to perform auto setup for the TFT, and the systems User's Guide to change the video to the optimum resolution.

Additional information

Changing the resolution away from native, to increase screen size, will result in text that is scaled up and looks fuzzy.

In CRT (Cathode Ray tube) monitors, as the resolution is changed, the image always looks sharp as the display is dynamically resized and no fixed geometry is involved.Note: This is not the case in a TFT monitor. Each TFT display has a fixed arrangement of pixels and if you move away from an exact match of image to pixel arrangement the screen quality is reduced as the monitors tries to expand the image to fit onto a predefined grid. Extra dots are added but they distort the characters and they look jagged. To improve this they then fuzz the images to try and hide the square pixels with the result that text looks distorted and fuzzy.

Another factor in creating a fuzzy picture may be incorrect DPI settings (dots per inch). A L170 should be set to 96 dpi which is "normal size". However, a 1024 x 768, 17" monitor should be set to about 120 dpi. To change this setting you need to go and open the display settings by clicking on display in the control panel. Then, click on the General tab and change the DPI setting to the correct setting.

After making the changes, you will be prompted to reboot before the new setting will be applied. In some cases, using the custom option to pick a DPI between 96 and 120 may allow you to get a larger text size in web applications without going so large that the text overflows frames, or overlaps.